Much of what the average individual experiences as work, learning or play is accomplished through their interactions with computers and software. Billions of times a day, hundreds of millions of people interact with computers and software in their daily pursuits. Increasingly, people are faced with the challenge of working with multiple independent software systems to perform everything from the most mundane to the most complicated tasks. As used herein, “software system” refers to one or more applications, programs, services, databases, firmware, executed scripts, middleware, sets of functionality available via web pages, etc. that share and/or receive data. In many cases, no single software system contains all of the required information or functionality and it is often the individual's job to act as the point of connection amongst the software systems they use.
Various solutions have been developed to address this problem. In particular, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/804,168 filed on Mar. 14, 2013, the entire contents of which are incorporated herein by reference, discloses a system wherein various software systems executing on various computing devices can share data item values between them in data-sharing sessions operated by a data-sharing server computer system. The software systems in a data-sharing session share values for semantically-identified data items and request data items that they need based on the semantics of the data items. The data-sharing server computer system provides software systems data item values shared by other software systems in the data-sharing session that semantically match the data items they requested whenever the data item values are updated in the data-sharing session.
The types of data-sharing sessions and the software systems permitted to participate therein are pre-defined. When a software system would like to join a data-sharing session, it registers with the data-sharing server computer system with an identifier of the type of data-sharing session that it wants to join. In order to have the software system indicate what type of data-sharing session it would like to join, the software systems are either configured directly or provided that configuration from another software system. If it is desired to have the software system register in a data-sharing session of a different type than it is configured to register in, either the software system or another software system that provides the configuration must be configured differently. This can be challenging where the software systems are installed on numerous client computing devices, such as personal workstations, etc. Further, any change to the identifiers used to specify a data-sharing session type must be reflected in the configuration of the software systems. Due to the effort required to reconfigure the software systems to participate in a different type of data-sharing session, they cannot be dynamically reconfigured as desired.
It is therefore an object of the invention to provide a novel method and system for registering software systems in data-sharing sessions.